Can We Get Bushwick Right?

At the Rheingold site, ODA tries to balance the needs and wants of rich and poor alike.

Aug 21, 20164 minutes

The proposal for the Rheingold brewery site.

JUSTIN DAVIDSON

123 MELROSE STREET

ODA, ARCHITECTS.

CAN AN ARCHITECT design a kinder, gentler gentrification? That question hums like a drone through a vast empty lot in Bushwick where the Rheingold Brewery once stood. Eran Chen, the Israeli-born founder of the architecture firm ODA, has sugarplum visions for this desolate stretch: nearly 1,000 apartments and a million square feet that would slip affably into a neighborhood that, despite its real-estate hotness and brand-name cool, remains tenaciously poor. Longtime residents and their new neighbors would mingle in the woodworking shop and photo lab and hang their creations side by side in the community art gallery. A microbrewery would open up onsite, making reference to the